The Legal Business of One Wisconsin County
Wisconsin made no attempt to collect information about the business
of its courts before 1951, when the newly formed Judicial Council was
charged with this task. Therefore, it is difficult to determine exactly
how caseloads and the types of cases coming before the state's trial
courts have changed over the years. However, in the late 1950s Francis
Laurent and Willard Hurst of the U.W. Law School conducted a unique
study of the Chippewa County courts from 1855 to 1954 to determine how
one county's caseloads and legal business changed during the last half
of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. They
analyzed and published the results in Laurent's book The Business of a
Trial Court (1959).
Laurent and Hurst's study demonstrated that at least in Chippewa
County, cases involving "the functioning of the market" consistently
dominated the courts' business after statehood. Civil cases outnumbered
criminal cases: Criminal cases averaged about 10-15 percent of the total
caseload throughout the 19th century but increased to 25-30 percent of
the caseload after 1920. Contract and real property cases have always
been the largest category of civil cases, although with the rise of the
industrial age and the automobile age, tort cases rose from less than 10
percent of the caseload in the 19th century to 20-25 percent in the
1940s. Major social changes had a direct effect on the courts' business:
For example, overall litigation decreased significantly during World War
I and World War II, and there was a burst of bank liquidation and
reorganization cases during the Depression years of the 1930s.
Laurent and Hurst concluded that despite the direct relationship
between economic and legal activity, "more striking is the relative
absence from litigation of great areas of statute law which deal with
the very framework of society." Once the constitutionality of the
landmark regulatory systems and agencies created during the 20th century
- for example, the worker's compensation system and the Industrial
Commission during the Progressive era and the unemployment compensation
system and economic relief laws of the 1930s - was established, they
worked smoothly without need for extensive intervention and guidance
from the courts.
Laurent and Hurst's study showed that the overall volume of cases in
Chippewa County grew only modestly from the late 19th to the mid-20th
century, after a period of steady and rapid expansion from 1855 to 1895.
This pattern may not be typical of other Wisconsin counties or the state
as a whole: Surveys of other counties done by the U.W. Law School in the
1930s and state statistics since the 1950s suggest that caseloads have
grown steadily and rapidly from the 1930s to the present throughout most
of the state. However, the same studies suggest that the mix of criminal
and civil cases in Chippewa County is fairly typical of the state as a
whole.
Wisconsin Lawyer
